


Take a Night

by ash818



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Felicity Being Badass, Jealousy, Male-Female Friendship, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:56:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1924116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash818/pseuds/ash818
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity has never seen that look on Oliver's face before. But then, she's never taken a night off to go on a date before either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take a Night

Late Thursday night, Felicity is on her way out the door when she remembers.

"I need to take tomorrow night off," she tells the boys, just as she rehearsed. Polite, but firm. Informing, not asking permission. "You’ll be ok without me?"

There’s no reason they shouldn’t be. Evil is always afoot, but lately it’s been tiptoeing.

Still, Oliver, Dig, and Roy give her vague frowns.

"Is everything ok?"

"Yeah, no worries," she says. "It’s for a nice reason, not a nasty one."

Dig nods, Roy gives her a wink, and they resume attempting to strangle each other on the mats. But Oliver’s frown deepens, and he takes a step toward her. He’s been watching her and Ray flirt at meetings for weeks now. He must have suspected this would happen. “Is this going to be a regular thing?”

She tries to tamp down the smile and the butterflies, because she’s been wondering the same thing for the past forty-eight hours. She can’t stop composing falling-in-love montages in her head to Ed Sheeran songs. “I don’t know yet.”

The frown melts away, and for half a second Oliver gives her the saddest, dopiest, most hopelessly hangdog expression she’s ever seen. Half a second, and no more. Then he smiles his smooth society smile. “Just let us know when you need to take a night.” He goes back to the quietly whirring grindstone.

For the fiftieth time since May, Felicity is torn between hugging the big stupid sad puppy and punching him in the arm. “Do you understand?” he asked her eight months ago in the mansion, and she understood more than he probably intended her to. Since then he has made her no promises, nor she him, but she feels a twinge of guilt regardless. A twinge which she thoroughly resents.

"Slade barely took a shot at you before I painted a target on your back," he told her a few days before Thanksgiving. "I can’t do that again. I just can’t."

If that’s how he feels about it, she is content to be his friend and partner. But is it too much to ask him to keep his pining to himself?

Besides, she likes Ray. Smiles when he walks in a room, reads his texts six times, laughs at jokes that would fall flat coming from anyone else -  _likes_  him.

Which is why it’s so stupid for her to sidle up next to Oliver and, too soft for Dig and Roy to hear, tell a white lie. “If it does become a thing, it’s not going to change anything with us.” It sounds even worse out loud than it did in her head, so she amends, “With this team, I mean. I’m still committed to what we do.”

"I don’t doubt that at all," he says, and this time his smile is real. It’s the same one he gave her with his hand cupping her cheek the night she got shot, and it makes her just as melty as it did then.

"I’ll always be your girl" slips out before she realizes how cruel it is.

His smile freezes. “Go have fun tomorrow night.”

And she does. She has more fun than she’s had since she took a job with Grimdark Vigilantes R Us. Ray kisses her good night in the car, and she walks on air all the way to her front door.

What’s more, she does not think about Oliver once, not even in passing. Except to congratulate herself on not thinking about Oliver, and to give herself extra kudos for not thinking about his hangdog expression, or about his melty smiles, and especially not about his hand cupping her cheek. Well done all around.

She’s still smiling when she returns to the lair (she calls it that just to hear Oliver say “it’s not a lair, it’s a… stop calling it that, please”). Oliver is already on patrol with Roy, but Dig is down there with a power drill, bolting a beautiful new wooden training dummy where the old one stood just the other day.

"Upgrade?" says Felicity.

"Replacement." He scowls at a misaligned bolt hole. "Somebody cracked the old one."

"Somebody cr - oh, God." She sinks into her chair with a melodramatic sigh, because she feels like she deserves a melodramatic sigh right now.

"Will you be going on a lot of these dates? Should I put some more on back order?"

She resists the temptation to facepalm. Liquid liner won’t stand up to that. “I think this is coming up on the line into complete ridiculousness.”

"Coming up on it?" Dig raises an eyebrow. "Look behind you."

She tosses her hands up, lets them fall in her lap. “Dig, I don’t know what to do.”

He gestures to the enormous bolt on the desk next to her and holds out his hand for it. “What do you mean?”

"I mean," she passes him the bolt, "I think I will be going on more of these dates."

Dig flashes her a smile, twinkly-eyed and teasing, and she wishes for the zillionth time that it were possible to legally adopt a big brother. “Enjoy yourself. That’s what you do.” The drill roars for a moment, there’s a grinding noise, and he sits back on his heels. “The rest is his problem.”

"Maybe," she murmurs. "But being all in love with him and stuff is almost definitely my problem."

Dig regards her seriously, with all the compassion she could ask for and not a trace of pity. “I know,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

They work quietly for a little while. She can’t find the bug in her code, and she feels like her hair is starting to frizz with the frustration radiating off her.

"I could maybe talk to him," Dig says. "If you wanted."

"And say what? ‘Oliver, please jeopardize an extremely effective working relationship crucial to our mission to save the city by turning it into a relationship-relationship, which, given your track record, will probably end in tears and recriminations if it doesn’t end in drowning or a gunshot wound to the head.’ Something like that?"

She’s had a lot of time to think about all the reasons she and Oliver are a bad idea. She has made lists. Once, she drew a Venn diagram.

"I thought I would tell him that life is too short for this kind of crap," Dig says, eyes narrowed at her in a calm, perceptive way that makes her shift in her seat. "And that I can’t believe the bravest man I know won’t even try to have something good because he’s so afraid of losing it. But I can do it your way, if you think that’s better."

She hugs herself, staring into her lap and fidgeting the spinny chair side to side a little bit. “That was mean, what I said. And unfair. I don’t really believe those things.”

"I know you don’t. But he does."

She looks up.

"And I don’t know that he’ll ever get past it. So you should go on those dates, and you should come in here smiling more often, ok?"

She gives him one right then, and she hopes he sees the gratitude in it. “How come you’re nice to me when I’m being grumpy and awful?”

The twinkle is back. “Because that’s when you need it, genius. Pass me that Phillips, would you?”

Three weeks later, Ray kisses her goodnight on her doorstep. And then some more in her living room. And then all the way down the hall.

She comes in to her night job smiling, and Oliver smiles back. When a tennis ball massacre covers sixty percent of the back wall the next morning, nobody talks about why.


End file.
